1988

In the July of 1988, as an 11 year old boy, I went to spend the summer with my father in the hills that tower above the walled city of Lucca in Tuscany. I did this every summer, but I had never been to this house before. It was outside a tiny hamlet called Matraia, about thirty minutes’ drive from Lucca. As we arrived I was stunned at how secluded the house was, It was a mile down a dry dusty track, surrounded by nothing  other than the exotic sights, sounds and smells of the Italian countryside. This was not the kind of place I associated with my father; the truth is looked forward to our summers together with a mixture of excitement and abject terror. I usually spent my holidays visiting him, somewhere in Italy where in a relatively short space of time my father had manage to attain a level of notoriety, that it would take a lesser rogue a lifetime of outrageous behaviour to achieve. It was safe to say wherever I visited him, there was always a plentiful supply of local bars and cafes, filled with locals, who took great joy in recanting stories of my father’s exploits to me (sometimes fabricated).  Making him seem to me, more like some sort of antihero straight out of the pages of Kerouac, than a man I would recognise as my father.

I Loved and hated these holidays by equal measure, I admired loved and hated him in what was an equally confusing way for an 11 year old boy. Yet here we were arriving  that summer, down this little dirt track in a similarly coloured and decrepit Opel Kadett, to this old white washed house, in the middle of nowhere. This time there was no new girlfriend to greet us, just a motley crew of dogs and cats, loitering by the house.

It took me at least a couple of days to adjust to this change of scene and establish the cause of this sea change in the chosen location for our summer. The cause was, that my father had quit drinking, I didn’t really understand why the need for the geographical change of location and this new found desire to somewhat distance himself from the world around him, until many years later I myself became a recovering alcoholic (a story for another time) .

There are a number of things that I remember still so clearly about that holiday. The first was that my father had taken to getting up every morning at five o’clock to play the saxophone that, for the entire holiday made me wake up with a feeling of terror, that I expect could only be replicated by the onset of Armageddon. This habit of his became so irksome that during these early morning intrusions into my sleep, I started to pine for the father I knew much better who would have still been soundly sleeping, possibly on the floor of the kitchen, after another night that would have been destined to go down in the annals of history, amongst the regulars of some small provincial Italian bar. The second memory of that holiday, that is still as clear in my mind, as the waters of those streams around the house that my father and I explored that summer, was that as a child it was the most wonderful holiday I ever spent with him. The last thing that stayed with me from that holiday was that it was the start of what has become a lifelong fascination with food.

Every morning at about 10:30 we would jump in that muddy brown car and drive, windows wound right down to the local bar/shop/post office in Matraia, I still love and search for the smell that blew up my nostrils as we drove down that dusky track, the smell of that Italian summer all those years ago. The smell of the coffee my father had when we finally settled ourselves at a table in the tiny garden behind that bar. And the smells and tastes of the bread, the ham, melon, tomatoes and olive oil that I knew was to come. It was a breakfast or a light lunch depending on what time you rise, that in the twenty four years that has passed since has yet to be matched. It was the summer that my senses  first awoke.